A Lubbock researcher hopes to increase the chances of pregnancy through assisted pregnancy procedures.

Dr. Samuel Prien, professor, director of clinical and research lab, director of IVF lab and director of resident research in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center, said his research is focused on techniques to find the best possible embryos for assisted pregnancies.

“What we’re trying to do now is called embryo transfer or set,” Prien said during an interview at his office Thursday. “We’re trying to get to the point where we put in one embryo. … The federal government has asked for grant releases that the government says ‘yes, that’s definitely the embryo that will go and make a baby.’ There’s a push for a noninvasive technique for assessing embryo quality.”

One technique being researched is how to test the weight of an embryo, a project Prien and a team of researchers are working on, Prien said.

“The biggest of the projects … is that we’re developing a technique in my lab that has received a lot of attention here lately,” he said. “It’s estimating the weight on an embryo right after conception.”

Being able to assess the weight of an embryo can help determine the degree to which they are preserved, he said.

“We think that it may help us improve freezing those embryos,” he said. “We lose a lot of embryos due to damage that’s created during the freezing process. It’s the only chance we have to having any chance to preserving when we lose them. So we said, ‘OK, can we customize how we’re going to freeze that embryo based upon its chemical nature?’ What we found is mom has a tremendous influence on what goes on inside early on.”

A mother with a higher body mass index will produce an embryo with a bit more fat, he said.

“The extra lipid inside the embryo makes it more difficult to freeze,” he said. “We’re looking at that.”

Advancing this area of research could eventually allow fertility experts to assess embryos for implantation and choose the highest quality cells with the best chance of developing fully, Prien said.

His research could eventually save embryos and money for people looking in to assisted pregnancies by eliminating the need for multiple embryo implantation, he said.

Having multiple embryos implanted can cause risks to the mother and babies because of the possibility of multiple births, Prien said.

“If a person receives one embryo, then the chances of multiples is about 5 percent,” said Dr. Jaou-chen Huang, professor in OB/GYN department at HSC and IVF program director. “If a person receives two embryos, it’s approximately 30 percent.”

While the possibility of a multiple birth may sound appealing to some, it provides many risks for the mother and babies, Prien said.

“Nobody really realized the downside consequences that a human uterus was never meant to bear litters,” he said. “It was assigned to carry a very simpleton pregnancy.”

Huang said the area is of high interest in the world of fertility.

“If an embryo can develop to its full potential, this is the one that is more likely to implant than the other,” Huang said. “So we have to decide which one to put back. We need to have a method. …So basically what Dr. Prien is trying to do, as well as what other people are trying to do, is find a way not to harm the embryo, but somehow can get an estimation of how likely in comparison amongst the embryos that are being cultured to determine which is the one that is most likely to implant. …That is one of the areas that’s being hotly pursued.”